linuxplatform

Beats said:

Is there actual proof?

I wish display production was cheaper then Apple could open a plant themselves. Samsung Display is a good company but you know their money goes to Samsung Mobile when they need it which is just a ripoff Apple company who slanders Apple.

Just a ripoff Apple company who slanders Apple? Please. Look at the iPhone 5, look at the Samsung Galaxy and then look at the iPhone 11. ESPECIALLY when you consider the latest iOS, Apple has spent the last 6 years giving their smartphones the same look and feel as the Samsung Galaxy line. It is true of iPads too. The iPad Pro is VERY SIMILAR to Samsung's previously existing Galaxy Tab Pro line. 

And if you call advertising for the purposes of competition "slander" you can't be helped. Especially since pretty much everything that Samsung said about Apple in those infamous commercials were acknowledged by Apple in the following years by Apple's changing their phones to be carbon copies of Samsung phones. If anyone was committing "slander" it was Tim Cook, who during the "switch to iPhone" promotion (which basically went nowhere and has since been abandoned) was engaging in maximum FUD scare tactics about "security" and "privacy" ... only to find out that most of the same issues that he accused Android of were also present on iOS thanks to apps, and that Apple wasn't doing a thing about it.

And the ultimate "slander" of all was Apple's trashing kids who use Chromebooks, which was just sour grapes over Apple's limitations in software making them unable to come up with cloud-based device management tools that public schools - who at the individual school level (not the "school district office" level) does not have the resources or expertise to staff private sector caliber IT departments - need, and oh yeah seems to be unable to come up with keyboard/trackpad solutions that don't cost more than an entire Chromebook itself. And why Microsoft - who also directs cheap barely functional Windows 10S netbooks towards public schools - was exempt from Apple's rant you have to explain. Oh wait ... you don't. Because Microsoft has less public school market share these days. So it wasn't about what was best for the kids at all. It was just sniping at another company for succeeding in the market place by addressing technological challenges - cost and management and yes if you don't think that cost is a technology issue then you have never worked in technology - that Apple fails to address.

And by the way ... it isn't that display production is cheap. Display production is EXTREMELY HARD. Samsung is the leader in display production and it took them decades of R&D and engineering to get there. They went from NOTHING in that space to #1 and surpassed a lot of other excellent companies along the line. Here is the deal: Samsung is the #1 company in the world in components right now. Doing components is straight physics and low level engineering combined with elite industrial and manufacturing engineering techniques. That has NEVER been Apple's bag. The great things they have done by way of acqui-hiring PA Semiconductor aside, Apple's thing has been taking the components built by others and putting them together to make great products. That's excellent engineering too but of a completely different type. Presuming that Apple would be the best in the world at it when other companies who were at it for decades, couldn't keep up and wound up going bankrupt or scrapping that part of the business in order to survive really paints you as someone who just likes Apple products and could care less about the technology and business aspects behind it.

Let me put it another way ... Apple almost certainly has a 3 nm design for their CPU and other chips ready to go. Why not go ahead and make and release them to blow the competition out of the water? Because ... the only company on the planet capable of building 3 nm chips at present is ... Samsung. TSMC - the company that actually builds Apple's CPU designs - is 12 to 18 months behind Samsung. Samsung has already started producing prototypes and will go into mass production of 3nm chips in 2021. Quite possibly their Exynos 995 CPUs. The Exynos 992 was their first 5 nm chip. It "may" be in the foreign editions of the Samsung Galaxy Note 20. It will definitely be in the foreign Samsung Galaxy S30. Meanwhile TSMC won't be able to give Apple a 3nm Ax chip until 2023. Oh yeah ... Intel will have 3nm capability in 2025. When you consider that their 14 nm Coffee Lake i9 and Xeon chips already outperform Apple's 7nm A13 ... yeah that is why I was telling everyone "hold the phone" on the claims that Apple Silicon was going to crush Intel in performance, because the comparison was Apple's 7 nm chips against Intel's 14nm. When Intel releases their 7 and 5 nm chips over the next few years - they may just skip straight from 10 nm to 5 nm to compete with AMD who has 5 nm chips coming next year - then we will see a real battle.

You know, there is a huge, wide, wonderful tech world out there of which Apple is only a small part of. Learning about it would be a lot of fun.

9secondkox2 said:

Nokia

Palm
HTC Mobile
RIM/Blackberry
Creative Zen
Microsoft Zune
Windows for Tablets
Android for tablets
Windows Mobile
Windows Phone
Windows Plays For Sure
Rhapsody
Google Music
Google Wear OS

Loads of products have fallen by the wayside because they couldn't compete with Apple hardware, software or services.  Android and others probably had a hand in putting down some of them too, but it was significantly and/or largely an Apple effect.

Dang. Truth.

And after looking at that mobile list, it looks like Apple is aiming at the PC industry with the future of the Mac. upside down (or rightsize up?) Marketshare shift coming right up...

Ummm ... no. Nokia, Palm, RIM/Blackberry, Windows for Tablets, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone are mobile devices. And Android had more to do with killing off Windows Mobile and Nokia than iOS did because it was Android that killed off all the competitors that were inevitably going to exist. 
HTC was killed off by Samsung and other Android OEMs.
Android tablets have 65% market share. Samsung alone sells more tablets than Apple does Macs. Android tablets being dead is nonsense from the tech media that never uses them.
Google Play Music still very much exists and is HUGE overseas where very few people use iPhones. And it is merely being folded into YouTube Music.
Wear OS was trash before the Apple Watch even entered the market. Most people didn't know that the product even existed.

Also, the mobile market was TINY and YOUNG when the iPhone defined it. By contrast the PC market is HUGE and has been in existence since the 1970s. Apple was a new entrant to the mobile market. But they have been in the PC market ... since the 1970s. And guess what? Apple has shifted CPUs lots of times before. Their original CPU. Then PowerPC. Then Intel. The only thing different than before is their using a chip that they designed.

So no. It isn't true at all. 

And you are forgetting the main thing: to have an impact on the CPU industry, Apple is going to have to make CPUs that run Windows, Linux and ChromeOS devices made by manufacturers other than Apple. If that doesn't happen: Qualcomm is going to have to make CPUs that are better than Intel's. And even if that DOES happen, Windows on ARM will have to perform BETTER than Wintel!

You guys are acting as if Windows is going to go away. Or Windows on ARM is going to get better. Or Qualcomm is going to match the Ax. None of those are going to happen.

auxio said:

linuxplatform said:

And note: you didn't answer my question. I asked you if Apple was going to make a range of CPUs that meet a range of price, performance and application needs. That is what Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Samsung and MediaTEK all do and have been doing for DECADES. That is what Apple has never done at any time and there isn't a bit of evidence that they are capable of it.  

I guess if you ignore the fact that they're using that EXACT strategy for pricing and positioning the different models of iPhones and iPads in the market

And I guess you are doing your level best to ignore my main argument. Mobile is not PC. Apple dominates mindshare and profit in mobile. In PC, they are basically a bit above Acer. Switching from Intel to ARM won't change that because Apple PCs will still cost twice and much and will still not be able to run most software that can run on Windows. You use Macs so their pricing and software issues don't affect you. They DO affect people who use and rely on the Windows platforms, both consumers and enterprises.

There isn't a single app that truly matters that runs on a Samsung smartphone or tablet that won't run on the iPhone SE 2 or the base iPad. Not the case in the Windows world and you know it.

blastdoor said:

linuxplatform said:

Apple Silicon plus macOS, Swift, Metal, and the rest of the stack now provides the most solid and technically advanced (relative to the rest of the industry) foundation in the history of the Mac. The last time the Mac, as an integrated hardware-software platform, was this advanced relative to the rest of the industry might have been when the Mac IIci was introduced. 

I can't believe that Apple would have spent so much time and money investing in this strong foundation to just punt on the software that runs on this platform. I anticipate that we are going to see a commitment to building out the app ecosystem on the Mac in a way that we haven't seen in decades. I'm very excited by what Apple Silicon means for the Mac!

"Apple Silicon plus macOS, Swift, Metal and the rest of the stack now provides the most solid and technically advanced (relative to the rest of the industry) foundation in the history of the Mac."

Even if that is true, it doesn't matter as much as you think because of the price of Apple hardware and the general unavailability of most of Windows software on a Mac. As I have said before, you guys are looking at this all wrong. You are thinking: "this makes me more excited than ever to be a Mac owner!" As well it should. But that isn't the issue. The real issue is: "why does this make me - as a Windows user - any more likely to buy a Mac than I was before?"

For you, who loves the Apple ecosystem, the Mac being on the same hardware/software platform as the iPad and iPhone is outstanding. But if you don't own an iPhone (15% market share) or iPad (35% market share) in the first place ... or if you own an iPhone/iPad but also have a Windows computer (as most do!) then why do you care? You don't. You only care about how much your device costs and whether it runs what you want it to run as you did before.

As far as punting on the software that runs on the platform ... when has Apple ever been a software company? They aren't. They are a hardware company. They get involved in software only inasmuch as the competition forces them to. You can basically say that software is to Apple what hardware is to Google. 

Also, I can answer your question. Apple doesn't care about competing with Wintel as much as you think. (If they did, it would be a crushing loss. At no time have Macs ever had more than 15% market share, and at times it has been less than 3% market share. More Chromebooks sell than Macs.) Apple cares more about platform convergence. Unifying iOS,iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS and HomeKit. Instead of chasing the people who don't use their products, giving the people who do use their products the best possible experience and performance. People who use Windows (and to a lesser extent Android, ChromeOS and Linux) will be irrelevant. But people who use Apple hardware will be VERY satisfied and much less likely to jump ship.

Apple and Wintel will diverge. The hardware will diverge further. The software will diverge. Apple people will become totally different from Windows people. They may even work in different industries, as you literally may not be able to do the work in an Apple shop on a Wintel machine and vice versa. And Apple is totally fine if that happens.

blastdoor said:

One way for Apple to take more business from Intel would be to put Apple Silicon in Apple datacenter and offer an "iCloud Pro" that is a more user-friendly analog to AWS (honestly, it would not be hard AT ALL to be more user-friendly than AWS). 

An iCloud Pro already exists. It is called a Chromebook. And Windows 10S for that matter. Look, cloud services cost money on an ongoing subscription basis. No one is going to buy them to replace the software that already runs natively on PCs. And if they were going to do that, again it would be cheap hardware like Chromebooks. They aren't going to pay twice as much as Wintel for the hardware AND THEN pay annual subscriptions for the software.

Look guys. Lots of computer makers have manufactured their own chips. Apple doing so isn't going to fundamentally change it any more than Samsung making their own Exynos chips changed the Android or ChromeOS landscape.